Houseplant Success Stories

Published 26 May 2024

Plants are hard to keep alive. You can trust me on that one, I've accidentally killed a lot of plants over the past 8+ years I've been living with them.

My houseplant journey began in 2017, when I moved to an apartment with a huge south-facing window that let in tons of light. I don't remember what the first plants I bought were, only that I killed multiple succulents by overwatering them. At some point I took a "Plants 101: How not to kill your plants" from Workshop PGH which helped a bit, but certainly wasn't a cure-all for killing plants.

These days I have a better track record than I used to, and my assortment of plants is reasonably stable. But I want to do a better job of stepping back and appreciating how far some of my plants have come over the years. I've had some of them for an awfully long time. So here are three highlights:

The Monstera: Raised from the dead! #

I've always liked monsteras, but they're often sold as fairly large plants, and I have an awful track record with those. (I've yet to buy anything in a gallon-sized pot or larger and keep it alive for more than a year or two, and few have ever flourished even for a bit.) So I've never bought a monstera.

But my downstairs neighbor is a fellow plant enthusiast, and a few years ago when she was traveling for a couple months during the summer, she asked me to take care of her collection. Among them was a decently large monstera that was very unhappy – lots of wilted, brown leaves, all drooping. Fortunately she told me not to worry if it didn't survive under my care. And unsurprisingly, I could not magically resuscitate her monstera. But once all the main stems were clearly in decline, I took a couple cuttings just in case it could be propagated.

To my surprise, every stem I put in water grew roots pretty quickly, so the plant wasn't entirely dead. When my neighbor returned though, she said she preferred to try again with another full-sized plant. I was now officially caring for a monstera of my own!

Fortunately, so far it seems to be a pretty straightforward plant. Both stems took to soil without issue and continued to grow new leaves. I had to do some research, because the leaves it was growing didn't look like your classic "swiss cheese" plant with distinctive holes. It turns out those only develop in older, more mature plants.

So for a couple of years now, I've been watching eagerly as each new leaf starts out slightly larger than the last. Each time a new leaf opened, I would remove an old one to help put more energy towards bigger leaves.

All this time I've been thinking, surely one day they'll start showing holes, right? Well, as of a few weeks ago, it's finally happening! The two newest leaves both have a single solitary hole or cutout in them.

This is hopefully only the halfway point of this plant's story, I'm still figuring out how best to keep it happy. I only recently learned that a lack of aerial roots means it's not getting enough humidity. Now I keep a spray bottle next to it and randomly spritz it a few times a day, which seems to have a made a huge difference. I'm excited to continue watching it grow and evolve, but I already have everything I could ask for here: a real, healthy plant despite its rough beginnings.

The Weird Plant: My extravagant success. #

I call this one "the weird plant", mostly because it seems impossible to make it grow in a way that looks nice, but also because for years I couldn't figure out what it was. I got the cuttings in April of 2018 when I had a concert poster framed at a local frame shop. The owner and I got to talking about plants somehow, and she offered to me a couple cuttings of the plant in her window when I picked up the poster. (I wish I had taken a picture of hers, because I don't remember thinking it looked weird at all.)

This started the same way as my monstera cuttings -- root the cuttings in water, then transplant. Fortunately these also took to soil. For a while I had three separate plants, then I combined two. And once I realized how easily its leaves could sprout roots in water, and how big they wanted to get, I went down to one pot and gave the other plant away. This thing wanted to get large enough that I needed to find a dedicated space for it.

The photo above was taken before I properly repotted it and set up its own plant light. It was around this time that I finally figured out it's a Dutchman's pipe cactus, or epiphyllum oxypetalum. You might be more familiar with it as the plant from Crazy Rich Asians that blooms at night for just a few hours. So that's cool. Obviously I now had a goal to get it to bloom.

The trouble was, the best place I had for the plant wasn't near a window. For about a year I had a desk lamp set up with a grow light bulb in it shining on the plant, but all that grew were tall leggy stems without leaves that wanted to just stretch forever. So I caved and got a fancy plant light that looked nicer in our living room and provided stronger light. That turned out to be the key!

Less than a year after getting the new light, in addition to leafy new growth, I noticed a weird little thing growing on a stem. I was cautiously optimistic, but it wasn't until it kept getting bigger and weirder-looking that I was convinced it was really a bud. But there it was!

Once you could see a real flower was there, just waiting to open, the waiting game got more intense. They're only open for a few hours, in the middle of the night, and I'm a person who is usually in bed by 9:30! So I charged up an old iPhone and started recording a time lapse video each night before bed in case it opened after we were asleep.

We had almost given up, but eventually one night just after dinner they all started opening. They produce enough of a smell that my partner noticed it and looked over to see it already partially open.

Since there were two plants in this pot, we actually got two rounds of blooms last year. Of course after it bloomed again I was afraid for a while that the plant was dying, but I think I've learned it was just underwatered. Plus, it propagates easily enough that, now that we've successfully seen in bloom, I've achieved everything I ever wanted for this plant. Though I can't deny I'll be curious to see if I can get it to bloom again some day. And maybe look a little nicer? It's not likely, but maybe not impossible!

The Aloe: A long, slow burn. #

I got this tiny baby plant from a friend of a friend in October of 2017. I think it's something in the aloe family (so this could be called a "pup" apparently), but I've never identified exactly what it is. Anyway, at the time I had small pot full of a different aloe plant that grew like a weed and produced little pups seemingly constantly, but this lone little one was clearly different. It was a darker green, with more apparent speckles, and firmer leaves.

I have no doubt its a standard, reasonably-available plant, but I treasured this as a special variant that I was lucky to have. (And as it was given to me by someone I don't know well, it absolutely is!) It seemed happy on my window sill, and even grew a couple new leaves. But then tragedy struck:

I forgot it was in a funky two-part pot and tilted it without holding onto the section the plant was in. It dropped to the ground and broke off literally all of its roots. I was crushed. This wasn't long before I took that Plants 101 class, and I remember showing this photo to the instructor and asking if she thought it was salvageable. She was optimistic, as succulents can often grow from leaves alone, so I stuck it back in the dirt and hoped for the best.

Let me tell you, I then spent years waiting for this plant to do anything at all. There's something particularly frustrating about watching a plant just stubbornly not change. All I wanted to do was dig the dang thing up and see if it was growing roots, but I just had to trust that if it wasn't visibly dying, something good was happening.

Eventually, after multiple years of seeming stasis, it did start to slowly grow. Repotting it years later and seeing actual roots was incredibly satisfying. (It was also nerve-wracking, I wanted to make sure I didn't damage it while transplanting it!)

Seeing real growth was awesome, but I knew the parent plant it came from had multiple pups growing under it. My dream was for it to finally reproduce so I could split one out and finally have a "backup" plant in case one got damaged. Just a month or so ago, that dream finally started to become a reality! And at a surprising rate. I expected one or two pups, but there are a bazillion tips sticking up now!

This one has to be my sweetest success so far. I spent so long thinking the poor thing wasn't going to make it, and it's so satisfying to step back and realize it's been almost seven years I've been hoping for this moment. Now I just need to look into how to split off pups once they're ready to be self-sustaining.

I hadn't realized until writing this all out, but all of the plants I look back on with the most fondness and satisfaction are the ones that were gifts from others. They're more difficult to replace, so these successes are all the sweeter for it.

Success doesn't mean you've completely "figured it out" #

Lest you think I have a perfect green thumb -- it's not all sunshine and roses here. Just this weekend I've had to throw out my second variegated rubber tree that died after at least a few years in my care, and I'm only guessing that it died by overwatering. There are a few other plants in my collection at the moment that aren't exactly happy at the moment either. I am firmly convinced that you can't learn to care for plants without a lot of trial and error. So if you want to be plant person, just go for it! A little bit of googling and tenacity can get you a long way, I promise.